GEORGE 

iERNARD 

SHAW 

HARLEQUIN 
OR  PATRIOT? 

BY 

JOHN   PALMER 


LIBRARY 

UNIVERSITY  OF 


1        SAN  DU-GO        j 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 


From  a  photograph  by  Alvin  Lang-don  Coburn 

GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

HARLEQUIN 
OR  PATRIOT? 


BY 
JOHN  PALMER 


NEW  YORK 

THE  CENTURY  CO. 

1915 


Copyright,  1915,  by 
THE  CENTURY  Co. 


Published  March,  1915 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER 

I  SHAW  THE  ENIGMA 

II  SHAW  NOT  AN  ORIGINAL,  THINKER      .        14 
HI  THE  "BETTER   THAN   SHAKESPEARE" 

FALLACY 20 

IV    SHAW    NOT    A    JESTER       ....  29 

V    HIS    REPUDIATION    OF    REASON        .         .  « 

VI    SHAW  FAR   FROM   BEING  AN  ANARCH- 
IST   88 

Vn  SHAW  A  PRECISION  RATHER  THAN  A 

CARELESS  MAN  OF  LETTERS    .      .       45 

VHI  THE  REAL.  SHAW 58 

IX  PASSION  AND  STYLE  THE  SECRETS  OF 

SHAW'S  SUCCESS 64 

X  OUR  MODERN  TREATMENT  OF  PROPH- 
ETS .  71 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 
HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 
I 

SHAW  THE  ENIGMA 

THE  first  fallacy  is  that  Bernard 
Shaw  is  an  immensely  public  per- 
son; that  he  is  a  sort  of  twentieth  cen- 
tury Grand  Monarch  who,  if  manners 
allowed,  would  dine  like  Louis  XIV  in 
the  presence  of  the  people  and  receive 
the  press  in  his  dressing-gown.  Now, 
it  is  true  that  Bernard  Shaw  has  been 
photographed  by  Alvin  Langdon  Co- 
burn  without  a  stitch ;  that  at  one  period 
of  his  career  he  almost  lived  upon  a  pub- 
lic platform;  that  he  invariably  tells  us 
3 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

the  private  history  of  each  of  his  books 
and  plays;  that,  partly  from  a  sense  of 
fun,  and  partly  from  a  determination 
that  what  he  has  seriously  to  say  shall 
be  heard,  he  talks  and  writes  a  good 
deal  about  himself;  and  that  he  has  al- 
lowed Mr.  Archibald  Henderson  to 
compile  a  sort  of  concordance  to  his  per- 
sonality. 

Nevertheless,  it  is  not  true  that  Ber- 
nard Shaw  is  an  immensely  public  per- 
son. Or  perhaps  I  should  put  it  this 
way:  Bernard  Shaw  whom  the  public 
knows  is  not  an  authentic  revelation  of 
the  extremely  private  gentleman  who 
lives  in  Adelphi  Terrace.  The  Ber- 
nard Shaw  whom  the  public  knows 
might  more  accurately  be  described  as 
a  screen.  What  the  public  knows  about 
Bernard  Shaw  is  either  trivial  or  mis- 
leading. Thus  the  public  knows  that 
4 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

Bernard  Shaw  can  read  diamond  type 
with  his  left  eye  at  a  distance  of  twenty- 
eight  inches ;  that  he  can  hear  a  note  the 
pitch  of  which  does  not  exceed  30,000 
vibrations  per  second ;  that,  when  he  sits 
down  upon  a  chair,  the  distance  between 
the  crown  of  his  head  and  the  seat  is 
3  feet,  1.8  inches.  These  things  are  triv- 
ial. Or  the  public  knows  that  Ber- 
nard Shaw  is  a  very  striking  and  pro- 
vocative writer  of  plays,  that  he  is  also 
a  socialist  and  a  vegetarian;  and  these 
things  are  misleading. 

That  is  why  any  satisfactory  account 
of  Bernard  Shaw  rendered  to  those  who 
have  allowed  themselves  to  be  deceived 
by  common  fame  must  necessarily  take 
the  form  of  a  schedule  of  popular  fal- 
lacies. Such  a  schedule  will  at  any  rate 
be  found  more  useful,  and  certainly  less 
hackneyed,  than  a  personal  "interview" 
5 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

and  description  of  one  who  has  been 
more  often  photographed  and  handled 
in  the  picturesque  and  familiar  way  of 
the  expert  pressman  than  the  most  pop- 
ular member  of  the  British  Cabinet. 
Perhaps,  therefore,  I  may  regard  my- 
self as  excused  from  accurately  sketch- 
ing the  wicket-gate  which  leads  to  Ber- 
nard Shaw's  private  dwelling,  or  from 
telling  the  story  of  his  velvet  coat,  or 
from  recording  the  number  of  times  he 
has  been  met  upon  the  top  of  an  omni- 
bus (where  he  used  virtually  to  live), 
or  betraying  what  he  writes  to  young 
people  in  confidence  about  the  nose  of 
a  celebrated  author. 

Intimate  revelations  of  this  kind  do 
not  take  the  public  far.  They  do  not 
seriously  disturb  the  inaccessible  privacy 
which  Bernard  Shaw  has  always  con- 
trived to  maintain.  The  truth  is  that 
6 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

the  authentic  author  of  "Man  and 
Superman"  has  never  really  been  in- 
terviewed; has  never  really  "plucked 
me  ope  his  doublet  and  offered  them 
his  throat  to  cut"  to  visitors  who  are 
likely  to  be  hiding  a  kodak  under 
their  coat  or  to  be  surreptitiously  fin- 
gering a  note-book.  Bernard  Shaw  of 
the  interviews  and  the  funny  stories 
is  public  enough ;  but  this  Bernard  Shaw 
is  almost  entirely  a  legend.  Before  this 
legend  gets  as  firm  a  hold  upon  New 
York  as  it  has  upon  London,  it  may  be 
well  to  number  some  of  the  more  strik- 
ing fallacies  of  which  it  is  composed. 
There  is  only  one  serious  drawback  to 
this  method  of  approach,  and  this  draw- 
back vanishes  almost  as  soon  as  it  is  ex- 
plained. Exploding  popular  fallacies 
is  disagreeable  work,  and  it  usually 
gives  to  the  sentences  of  the  author  en- 
7 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

gaged  upon  it  an  air  of  quarreling  vio- 
lently with  his  readers  and  with  his  sub- 
ject. 

Such  is  not  the  intention  or  mood  of 
this  present  article.  I  have  an  immense 
enthusiasm  and  liking  for  Bernard 
Shaw  and  for  the  greater  part  of  most 
of  what  Bernard  Shaw  has  written.  I 
claim,  indeed,  to  admire  Bernard  Shaw 
for  sounder  and  weightier  reasons  than 
have  yet  occurred  to  Bernard  Shaw  him- 
self. These  reasons  will  be  presented 
later  in  a  postscript  of  appreciation. 
When  the  worst  fallacies  regarding 
Bernard  Shaw  have  been  briefly  de- 
scribed and  contradicted  (it  would  re- 
quire a  large  volume  to  describe  and  con- 
tradict them  in  detail) ,  I  shall  be  in  a 
better  position  to  assert,  briefly  again, 
wherein  Bernard  Shaw's  genius  truly 
consists ;  exactly  how  serious  he  is ;  and, 
8 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

more  particularly,  why  he  has  just  writ- 
ten a  pamphlet  about  the  war,  and  why 
he  ought  not  to  have  done  so.  Mean- 
time I  hope  that  readers  of  this  article 
will  agree  to  digest  the  fallacies  and  to 
wait  for  the  postscript;  also  to  believe 
that  my  habitually  indignant  manner  is 
simply  the  result  of  writing  regularly 
about  the  British  theater. 

The  first  fallacy  is  already  declared; 
namely,  that  Bernard  Shaw  is  a  public 
person.  The  second  fallacy  is  that  Ber- 
nard Shaw  is  an  easy  and  profitable  sub- 
ject to  write  about.  He  is  not.  It  is 
true  that  Bernard  Shaw's  interviews 
with  the  press  are  the  best  interviews, 
and  that  he  invariably  galvanizes  the 
dullest  of  his  appreciators  into  liveli- 
ness. Pronounce  the  name  of  Bernard 
Shaw  in  almost  any  company,  and  im- 
mediately every  one  perks  up  with  an 
9 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

epigram  or  a  paradox  or  an  anecdote. 
Bernard  Shaw  like  Falstaff  is  not  only 
witty  himself ;  he  is  the  occasion  that  wit 
is  in  other  men. 

Nevertheless,  Bernard  Shaw  is  not  a 
good  subject.  It  is  not  encouraging  to 
embark  upon  an  enterprise  with  the  sure 
knowledge  that  the  thing  has  been  done 
before  and  better  done.  Bernard  Shaw 
is  not  a  good  subject  because  he  has  al- 
ready been  exhausted.  There  is  not 
more  than  one  expert  upon  Bernard 
Shaw.  Every  one  professionally  re- 
quired to  write  about  Bernard  Shaw  sets 
out  under  an  unfortunate  sense  that  the 
ground  has  already  been  covered;  that 
the  job  has  already  been  done  bril- 
liantly, thoroughly  and  finally. 

The  best  essays  on  the  work  of  Ber- 
nard Shaw,  the  most  impartial  authori- 
tative, and  penetrating,  are  by  Bernard 
10 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

Shaw  himself.     The  best  stories  about 
Bernard  Shaw,  whether  they  are  the 
cruel,  illuminating  anecdotes  which  de- 
light the  envious,  or  the  flashes  of  re- 
sources and  honesty  which  are  cherished 
by  his  friends  and  admirers,  are  once 
again     by     Bernard     Shaw     himself. 
Should  you  set  out  to  extol  or  to  ad- 
vertise Bernard  Shaw,  you  know  that 
this  has  already  been  done  with  incom- 
parable energy  and  talent,  and  that  it 
has    been    done   by    one    who    knows. 
Should  you,  on  the  other  hand,  set  out 
to  expose  or  pull  to  tatters  the  reputa- 
tion and  character  of  Bernard  Shaw, 
again  you  know  that  you  are  the  merest 
amateur  compared  with  G.  B.  S. ;  know 
also  that,  if  you  want  to  do  the  busi- 
ness   effectively,    and    leave    Bernard 
Shaw  obviously  for  dead  on  the  field 
of  controversy,  you  will  have  to  call  in 
11 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

G.  B.  S.  to  help  you.  It  is  possible  to 
slay  Bernard  Shaw;  but  it  is  possible  to 
slay  him  only  in  alliance  with  himself. 
It  is  a  joke  of  the  two  hemispheres  that 
Bernard  Shaw  better  understands  his 
merits  than  any  one  else  in  the  world. 
It  is  a  finer  joke,  and  not  so  thread- 
worn,  that  he  better  understands  his 
limitations.  Either  way,  whether  you 
are  celebrating  his  genius  or  asserting 
your  position  as  the  candid  friend,  you 
are  forced  to  acknowledge  at  the  last 
that  your  researches  into  Bernard  Shaw 
are  simply  not  in  the  same  class  with  his 
own  either  in  intimacy  (which  is  sur- 
prising in  an  age  when  the  press  is  often 
more  intimate  with  a  man  than  his  own 
tooth-brush) ;  in  detachment  and  ab- 
sence of  favor  (which,  again,  is  surpris- 
ing, in  an  age  when  men  of  letters  take 
themselves  very  seriously) ;  or  in  a  se- 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

verely  just  recognition  of  the  subject's 
merit  (more  surprising  still  in  an  age 
when  public  men  carefully  cultivate  a 
reputation  for  modesty) . 


13 


II 

SHAW  NOT  AN  ORIGINAL  THINKER 

THE  third  fallacy  is  that  Bernard 
Shaw  is  a  profoundly  original 
thinker  and  a  propagandist  of  abso- 
lutely new  ideas.  He  has  repeatedly 
told  his  readers  and  his  friends  that  he 
is  nothing  of  the  kind.  His  biographer 
somewhere  quotes  him  as  saying,  "I  am 
an  expert  picker  of  men's  brains,  and 
I  have  been  extremely  fortunate  in  my 
friends."  Nor  need  we  go  to  Bernard 
Shaw's  biographer  for  this.  Bernard 
Shaw  has  spent  half  his  life  in  telling 
the  world  the  exact  scientific  truth  about 
himself,  and  of  course  the  world  has 
refused  to  believe  him.  It  is  hardly  ex- 
14 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

aggeration  to  say  that  whenever  Ber- 
nard Shaw  tells  people  soberly  and  hon- 
estly exactly  the  sort  of  man  he  is,  and 
exactly  the  kind  of  work  he  has  done, 
they  laugh  heartily,  and  say  that  Ber- 
nard Shaw  is  a  very  funny  and  inventive 
person.  Similarly,  whenever  he  ven- 
tures into  fun  and  fiction,  his  hearers  in- 
sist upon  taking  him  seriously  as  they 
would  take  a  prophet. 

It  follows  that  Bernard  Shaw,  who 
is  a  modest,  conscientious,  kindly,  in- 
dustrious, and  well-read  man  of  letters, 
is  commonly  regarded  as  a  reckless  fire- 
brand who  lives  by  the  cart  and  the 
trumpet,  is  up  to  his  neck  in  all  that  is 
lawless  and  improper,  is  without  com- 
passion or  shame,  speaks  always  in  par- 
adoxes, and  claims  to  be  greater  than 
Shakspere.  Not  fewer  than  fourteen 
years  ago  Bernard  Shaw  told  the  world 
15 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

that  he  was  an  elderly  gentleman  who 
had  made  an  immense  reputation  by 
being  the  best  of  a  bad  lot  and  by 
plagiarizing  the  English  classics.  He 
really  meant  what  he  said;  but  the  pref- 
ace in  which  he  said  it  is  still  supposed 
to  be  the  locus  classicus  of  his  claim  to 
supersede  the  author  of  "Macbeth." 
Here,  again,  it  is  impossible  to  say  of 
Bernard  Shaw  any  true  thing  he  has 
not  already  said  of  himself.  He  has 
repeatedly  urged  his  critics  and  follow- 
ers to  reject  utterly  the  legend  of  G. 
B.  S.  "I  find  myself,"  Bernard  Shaw 
wrote  in  1900,  "while  still  in  middle  life 
almost  as  legendary  a  person  as  the 
Flying  Dutchman.  Critics,  like  other 
people,  see  what  they  look  for,  not  what 
is  actually  before  them.  In  my  plays 
they  look  for  my  legendary  qualities, 
and  find  originality  and  brilliancy  in 
16 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

my  most  hackneyed  claptrap.  Were 
I  to  republish  Buckstone's  'Wreck 
Ashore'  as  my  latest  comedy,  it  would 
be  hailed  as  a  masterpiece  of  perverse 
paradox  and  scintillating  satire." 

Nothing  in  modern  literary  history  is 
more  remarkable  than  the  reputation  of 
G.  B.  S.  for  original  and  daring  specu- 
lation; and  no  one,  myself  possibly  ex- 
cepted,  more  thoroughly  appreciates 
the  funny  side  of  G.  B.  S.  as  philoso- 
pher than  the  man  to  whom  this  repu- 
tation is  so  persistently  attached.  Five 
years  ago  I  came  to  London  burdened 
with  the  classic  wisdom  of  an  ancient 
university.  I  had  read  some  philoso- 
phy in  one  school  and  some  economy 
in  another.  As  a  musician  I  had  read 
Wagner  for  a  venerable  classic.  As 
the  merest  Philistine  in  connoisseurship, 
I  recognized  in  Rodin  a  great  sculptor 
17 


of  the  last  generation,  as  firmly  estab- 
lished in  immortality  as  Michelangelo, 
and  I  saluted  in  the  New  English  Art 
Club  a  thoroughly  respectable  academy 
of  painting.  As  a  playgoer  destined  to 
succeed  Max  Beerbohm,  who  himself  in 
remote  antiquity  had  succeeded  G.  B.  S. 
on  the  "Saturday  Review,"  I  had  be- 
come weary  of  Ibsen,  and  had  begun  to 
wonder  why  Granville  Barker  seemed 
old  enough  to  be  my  uncle.  Now,  I 
do  not  regard  myself  as  being  in  the 
least  in  advance  of  my  time;  yet  when 
I  came  to  London  I  found  that  Bernard 
Shaw,  who  still  preached  Ibsen  and 
Wagner,  who  spoke  with  Rodin  as  a 
contemporary,  who  preached  a  phi- 
losophy which  was  already  introduced 
into  examination-papers  at  a  place  not 
suspected  of  modernism,  who  talked 
economy  out  of  university  text-books 
18 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

which  it  was  a  scholarly  and  pedantic 
exercise  to  confute  in  the  lecture-rooms 
of  Oxford — that  this  thoroughly  safe, 
orthodox,  and  almost  medieval  Bernard 
Shaw  was  being  received  by  the  literary 
societies  and  the  press  of  London  as  an 
original  and  revolutionary  thinker.  I 
then  began  to  understand  why  Bernard 
Shaw  has  very  little  respect  for  some  of 
his  contemporaries. 


19 


Ill 

THE  « BETTER  THAN  SHAKE- 
SPEARE "  FALLACY 

THIS  brings  us  to  the  fourth  fal- 
lacy. The  fourth  fallacy  is  that 
Bernard  Shaw  has  made  enormous  and 
extravagant  claims  for  himself  as  a 
critic,  philosopher,  sociologist,  and 
dramatist.  Let  us  take  a  passage  of 
Bernard  Shaw's  preface  to  the  "Plays 
for  Puritans."  It  is  the  famous  "Bet- 
ter than  Shakespeare"  passage,  the 
foundation  of  a  public  charge  that 
George  Bernard  Shaw  thinks  too  highly 
of  himself.  It  is  a  conclusive  proof 
that  he  does  nothing  of  the  kind.  Ob- 
serve also  that  it  harks  back  to  our 
second  fallacy: 

20 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

My  stories  are  the  old  stories,  my  charac- 
ters are  the  familiar  harlequin  and  colum- 
bine, clown  and  pantaloon  (note  the  harle- 
quin's leap  in  the  third  act  of  Ccesar  and 
Cleopatra}  ;  my  stage  tricks  and  suspenses 
and  thrills  and  jests  are  the  ones  in  vogue 
when  I  was  a  boy,  by  which  time  my  grand- 
father was  tired  of  them.  ...  It  is  a  dan- 
gerous thing  to  be  hailed  at  once,  as  a  few 
rash  admirers  have  hailed  me,  as  above  all 
things  original ;  what  the  world  calls  origi- 
nality is  only  an  unaccustomed  method  of 
tickling  it.  Meyerbeer  seemed  prodigiously 
original  to  the  Parisians,  when  he  first  burst 
on  them.  To-day  he  is  only  the  crow  who 
followed  Beethoven's  plough.  I  am  a  crow 
who  have  followed  many  ploughs.  No  doubt 
I  seem  prodigiously  clever  to  those  who 
have  never  hopped  hungry  and  curious 
across  the  fields  of  philosophy,  politics  and 
art.  Karl  Marx  said  of  Stuart  Mill  that 
his  eminence  was  due  to  the  flatness  of  the 
surrounding  country.  In  these  days  of 
Board  Schools,  universal  reading,  newspa- 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

pers  and  the  inevitable  ensuing  demand  for 
notabilities  of  all  sorts,  literary,  military, 
political  and  fashionable,  to  write  paragraphs 
about,  that  sort  of  eminence  is  within  the 
reach  of  very  moderate  ability.  Reputa- 
tions are  cheap  nowadays. 

Who,  after  that,  will  say  that  Bernard 
Shaw  has  in  him  a  particle  of  author's 
conceit?  He  has  never  claimed  more 
than  is  due  to  him.  There  is  not  the 
least  evidence  of  vanity  or  self-impor- 
tance in  the  printed  work  of  George 
Bernard  Shaw,  there  is  even  less  in  his 
speeches,  letters  (the  private  letters  of 
George  Bernard  Shaw  will  be  his 
masterpiece  when,  and  if,  they  ever 
come  to  be  published),  conversation,  or 
general  demeanor.  It  is  true  that  he 
has  frequently  and  vigorously  claimed 
not  to  be  entirely  foolish,  and  that  some- 
times he  has  insisted  that  he  really  does 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

know  what  he  is  writing  about.  But 
it  is  also  true  that  no  critic  has  more 
persistently  assured  the  public  that  there 
is  nothing  really  important  or  new  in 
any  of  the  ideas  and  devices  which  so 
curiously  amazed  the  first  audiences  of 
his  early  plays.  Has  he  not  soberly 
assured  the  American  public  that  "the 
novelties  of  one  generation  are  only  the 
resuscitated  fashions  of  the  generation 
before  last"?  And  has  he  not  proved 
this  with  instances  out  of  "The  Devil's 
Disciple"?  Did  he  not  prophesy  out- 
right in  1900  that  the  lapse  of  a  few 
years  would  expose  that  play  for  "the 
threadbare  popular  melodrama  it  tech- 
nically is"? 

Nevertheless,   though   it  is   possible 
for  any  one  read  in  the  works  of  Ber- 
nard Shaw  to  parallel  these  instances 
of    self-assessment    from    almost    any 
23 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

volume,  pamphlet,  speech,  or  anecdote 
of  his  life,  the  helief  still  rules  that 
Bernard  Shaw  is  too  highly  appreciated 
by  Bernard  Shaw.  The  truth  is  that 
Bernard  Shaw  has  had  to  expend  vast 
stores  of  energy  and  time  in  reproving 
his  friends  for  thinking  too  much  of 
him  and  in  snubbing  the  worship  of  his 
followers.  He  has  had  continually  to 
explain  to  the  superior  socialists  that  he 
is  not  really  a  great  orator;  to  the  dra- 
matic critics  that  he  is  not  really  the 
supreme  dramatist  who  ever  lived;  to 
men  of  science  that  he  is  not  the  erudite 
physician  they  have  imagined  from 
"The  Doctor's  Dilemma"  and  not  the 
expert  in  acoustics  they  have  inferred 
from  "Pygmalion";  to  distracted  heads 
of  families  that  he  is  not  in  the  least 
qualified  to  tell  them  how  to  control 
their  marriageable  daughters.  Ber- 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

nard  Shaw  has  worked  harder  to  escape 
the  greatness  which  is  thrust  upon  him 
than  many  of  his  contemporaries  have 
worked  to  achieve  wealth  and  a  blue 
ribbon;  and  the  harder  he  has  worked, 
the  more  convinced  the  public  has  be- 
come that  he  is  an  incorrigibly  insolent 
and  pertinacious  champion  of  his  title 
to  be  infallible. 

It  is  essential  to  get  this  notion  of 
Bernard  Shaw  as  the  miles  gloriosus 
corrected  at  the  start,  otherwise  we  shall 
never  handle  the  key  to  his  achievement. 
You  will  ask  how  it  has  arisen.  It  has 
arisen  simply  and  inevitably  from  the 
fact  that  Bernard  Shaw  was  for  many 
years  of  his  life  a  professional  critic, 
and  that  he  was  by  nature  able  to  re- 
gard himself  and  his  own  performances 
with  complete  detachment.  Naturally, 
when  he  came  to  write  plays,  and 
25 


found  that  the  said  plays  were  incom- 
petently criticized,  he  used  his  native 
gift  for  regarding  himself  impartially, 
and  his  acquired  skill  as  a  professional 
critic,  to  inform  his  readers  exactly  how 
good  and  how  bad  his  plays  really  were, 
Hence  he  has  acquired  a  reputation  for 
vainglory,  for  it  is  a  rooted  idea  with 
some  people  that  a  man  who  talks  about 
himself  is  necessarily  vainglorious. 

Bernard  Shaw's  detached  and  disin- 
terested observation  of  his  own  career 
and  achievements  is  not  within  the 
power  of  the  average  man  of  letters. 
It  was  accordingly  misunderstood. 
Not  every  one  can  discuss  his  own  work 
as  though  it  were  the  work  of  a  stran- 
ger. The  self-criticism  of  Bernard 
Shaw,  read  as  a  whole,  shows  an  amaz- 
ing literary  altruism.  It  shows  exactly 
how  far  he  is  from  consenting  to  occupy 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

the  throne  into  which  he  has  been  thrust. 
Bernard  Shaw,  in  his  prefaces,  is  not 
a  prophet  claiming  inspiration  for  his 
script ;  he  is  one  of  the  crowd  that  reads 
and  judges  for  itself;  only  he  reads  and 
judges  a  little  more  closely  and  severely 
than  the  rest.  Bernard  Shaw's  mod- 
esty— his  curious  aloofness  from  his 
own  fame — is  the  more  attractive  in 
that  it  is  absolutely  innocent  of  stage- 
management.  There  are  men  who 
have  made  corners  in  retirement — men 
of  whom  it  is  at  once  exclaimed  how 
humble  and  unspoiled  they  are. 
Shrewd  observers  will  always  suspect 
the  man  of  letters  who  is  famous  for  his 
modesty;  who  seems  to  think  it  posi- 
tively indecent  that  his  face  should  be 
seen;  who  has  always  "just  left  the 
theater"  when  there  is  a  call  to  be  taken ; 
who  has  a  reputation  for  inaccessibil- 
27 


ity.     Bernard  Shaw,  of  course,  is  en- 
tirely free  of  this  organized  and  blush- 
ing humility.     His  very  real  modesty 
consists  in  his  being  able  to  assess  him- 
self correctly.     He  is  one  of  the  few 
living  authors  who  has  not  been  taken 
in  by  his  own  performances.     It  does 
not  occur  to  him  to  divide  the  literature 
of  the  day  into  (a)  the  works  of  Ber- 
nard   Shaw    and    (b)    other   people's 
works.     He  thinks  of  "Man  and  Super- 
man" as  he  thinks  of  "The  Silver  Box." 
It  is  a  play  of  contemporary  interest 
and  of  some  merit,  and  he  does  not  see 
why  he  should  be  barred  from  discuss- 
ing it  as  an  expert  critic  just  because 
he  happens  to  be  the  author.     Bernard 
Shaw  has  certainly  imposed  upon  many 
of  his  friends  and  observers.     He  has 
not  imposed  upon  himself. 


IV 

SHAW  NOT  A  JESTER 

THE  fifth  fallacy  is  that  Bernard 
Shaw  is  an  incorrigible  jester, 
that  he  is  never  serious,  that  he  is  ready 
to  sacrifice  his  best  friend  and  his  firm- 
est conviction  for  the  sake  of  a  really 
good  joke.  Now,  the  first  thing  to  re- 
alize about  Bernard  Shaw  is  his  over- 
flowing gravity.  He  has  taken  more 
things  seriously  in  his  career  than  any 
living  and  notable  person.  He  has 
taken  music  seriously,  and  painting  and 
socialism  and  philosophy  and  politics 
and  public  speaking.  He  has  taken 
the  trouble  to  make  up  his  mind  upon 
scores  of  things  to  which  the  average 
29 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

heedless   man   hardly   gives    a   second 
thought — things  like  diet,  hygiene,  vac- 
cination, phonetic  spelling,  and  vivisec- 
tion.    He  has  even  taken  seriously  the 
English  theater,  unlike  virtually  every 
other  English  man  of  letters  who  has 
had  anything  to  do  with  it.     Compare 
for  a  moment  the  conduct  of  Bernard 
Shaw  at  a  rehearsal  of  one  of  his  own 
plays  with  the  conduct,  say,  of  Barrie. 
Barrie  is  happy  so  long  as  no  one  takes 
any  notice  of  him.     He  has  so  immense 
a  disdain  for  the  minutiae  of  theatrical 
production  that  he  would  rather  write 
ten  plays  than  control  the  rehearsal  of 
one.     Bernard    Shaw,    on    the    other 
hand,  with  the  amazing  industry  of  a 
really  serious  person,  turns  up  with  a 
closely  written  volume  of  notes,  deter- 
mining  down   to   the  minutest   detail 
where,  how,  and  when  his  company  shall 
30 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

deliver  their  lines  and  do  their  necessary 
"business."  It  is  only  because  Ber- 
nard Shaw  is  so  immensely  serious  that 
he  can  be  so  tremendously  casual  and 
brilliant.  He  is  ready  for  everything 
and  everybody  because  he  has  seriously 
considered  everything  and  seriously  re- 
garded everybody.  A  first-rate  im- 
promptu usually  indicates  a  mind  richly 
stored  and  well  arranged.  Bernard 
Shaw  can  extemporize  on  most  sub- 
jects because  he  has  seriously  thought 
about  them.  The  more  brilliantly  he 
sparkles  upon  a  given  theme,  the  more 
sober  has  been  his  education  in  its  rudi- 
ments. Unfortunately,  many  people 
have  come  to  exactly  the  opposite  con- 
clusion. Because  Bernard  Shaw  has  a 
rapid  and  vital  way  of  writing,  because 
he  presents  his  argument  at  a  maximum, 
seasons  it  with  boisterous  analogies, 
31 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

and  frequently  drives  it  home  at  the 
point  of  a  hearty  joke,  he  is  suspected 
of  sacrificing  sense  to  sound.  The 
dancing  of  his  manner  conceals  the  se- 
vere decorum  of  his  matter.  It  is  true 
that  Bernard  Shaw  can  be  funny,  but 
it  is  wholly  false  that  he  is  in  the  least 
a  flippant  writer  or  a  careless  thinker. 
He  is  as  serious  as  Praise-God  Bare- 
bones  and  as  careful  as  Octavius  Cassar. 


HIS  REPUDIATION  OF  REASON 

THE  sixth  fallacy  has  to  do  with 
the  all-head-and-no-heart  for- 
mula. It  is  said  of  Bernard  Shaw  by 
some  very  excellent  critics  that  he  is 
an  expert  logician  arguing  in  vacuo, 
that  he  has  exalted  reason  as  a  god,  that 
his  mind  is  a  wonderful  machine  which 
never  goes  wrong  because  its  owner  is 
not  swayed  by  the  ordinary  passions, 
likes,  prejudices,  sentiments,  impulses, 
infatuations,  enthusiasms,  and  weak- 
nesses of  ordinary  mankind.  How  the 
critics  square  this  notion  of  Bernard 
Shaw  with  the  kind  friend  and  coun- 
selor who  lives  in  Adelphi  Terrace  they 
33 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

alone  can  tell.  It  is  probably  this  idea 
of  Bernard  Shaw  which  most  heartily 
tickles  him.  Bernard  Shaw  greatly  en- 
joys contemplating  the  motley  crowd 
of  his  legendary  selves;  but  none  can 
please  him  more  thoroughly — because 
none  could  be  more  outrageously  ficti- 
tious— than  Bernard  Shaw  the  vivisec- 
tor  of  his  kind,  the  high  priest  of  rea- 
son and  common  sense. 

This  last  superstition  has  grown 
mainly  out  of  the  simple  fact  that  G. 
B.  S.  as  a  critic  of  music,  art,  and  the 
drama  was  actually  a  critic.  He  took 
his  criticism  as  seriously  as  he  took  his 
socialism  or  his  conviction  that  tobacco 
was  a  noxious  weed.  Being  a  serious 
critic,  he  found  it  necessary  to  tell  the 
truth  concerning  the  artistic  achieve- 
ments of  many  sensitive  and  amiable 
young  people.  Naturally,  Bernard 
34, 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

Shaw  got  the  reputation  of  being  a 
heartless  brute  for  his  candor,  and  a  log- 
ical brute,  owing  to  the  soundness  of 
his  arguments.  Then,  when  Bernard 
Shaw  came  to  write  plays,  it  was  dis- 
covered that  his  young  women  behaved 
like  reasonable  creatures  and  that  his 
young  men  appreciated  the  importance 
of  five  per  cent.  This  was  unusual  in 
the  soft,  romantic  stage  creatures  of 
the  late  nineties;  so  here  was  more  evi- 
dence of  Bernard  Shaw's  insensibility, 
of  his  arid  and  merciless  rationalism, 
of  his  impenetrable  indifference  to  all 
that  warms  the  blood  of  common  hu- 
manity. 

Of  course  there  was  not  the  slightest 
real  evidence  of  all  this.  If  there  is 
one  idea  more  than  another  that  per- 
sists all  through  the  work  of  Bernard 
Shaw,  and  defines  his  personality,  it 
35 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

is  to  be  found  in  his  perpetual  repudia- 
tion of  reason.  Almost  his  whole  lit- 
erary career  has  been  spent  in  adapting 
the  message  of  Schopenhauer  to  his 
own  optimism  and  belief  in  the  good- 
ness of  life.  Not  reason  and  not  the 
categories  determine  or  create,  but  pas- 
sion and  will.  Bernard  Shaw  has  al- 
ways insisted  that  reason  is  no  motive 
power;  that  the  true  motive  power  is 
will ;  that  the  setting  up  of  reason  above 
will  is  a  damnable  error.  Life  is  the 
satisfaction  of  a  power  in  us  of  which 
we  can  give  no  rational  account  what- 
ever— that  is  the  final  declaration  of 
Bernard  Shaw;  and  his  doctrine  corre- 
sponds with  his  temperament.  Rud- 
yard  Kipling  has  described  the  ration- 
alists as  men  who  "deal  with  people's 
insides  from  the  point  of  view  of  men 
who  have  no  stomachs."  Bernard 
36 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

Shaw  would  agree.  No  one,  in  habit 
or  opinion,  lives  more  remotely  than 
Bernard  Shaw  from  the  clear,  hard, 
logical,  devitalised,  and  sapless  world 
of  Comte  and  Spencer. 


VI 

SHAW  FAR  FROM  BEING  AN 
ANARCHIST 

THE  seventh  fallacy  is  that  Ber- 
nard Shaw  is  an  anarchist,  a  dis- 
turber of,  the  peace,  a  champion  of  the 
right  of  every  man  to  do  as  he  pleases 
and  to  think  for  himself.  This  idea  of 
Bernard  Shaw  is  so  deeply  rooted  in 
the  public  mind,  despite  Bernard 
Shaw's  serious  and  repeated  disclaim- 
ers of  its  accuracy,  that,  if  any  young 
person  in  London  runs  away  from  her 
parents,  or  if  any  elderly  gentleman 
abandons  his  wife  and  family,  these 
things  are  not  only  regarded  as  the  re- 
sults of  Bernard  Shaw's  pernicious 
38 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

teaching,  but  their  perpetrators  are  up- 
held and  justified  by  the  belief  that  they 
are  disciples  following  the  lead  of  G. 
B.  S.  as  prophet  and  master.  These 
startling  misconceptions  have  arisen 
from  the  fact  that  Bernard  Shaw  has 
pointed  out  in  a  popular  play  that  chil- 
dren do  not  always  agree  in  all  points 
with  their  parents,  and  that  he  has  ar- 
gued in  a  less  popular  play  that  one  or 
two  reforms  in  the  marriage  laws  of 
Great  Britain  are  already  overdue. 
Was  ever  a  reputation  won  upon  slen- 
derer evidence?  Why,  Shakspere  told 
us  three  hundred  years  ago  how 

The  hedge-sparrow  fed  the  cuckoo  so  long 
That  it  had  its  head  bit  off  by  its  young, 

and  it  is  now  on  record  in  a  British  blue- 
book  that  a  committee  of  the  most  re- 
spectable gentlemen  of  the  British  bar 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

and  church  have  agreed  with  Bernard 
Shaw  that  British  divorce  is  unneces- 
sarily expensive,  inequitable,  and  hu- 
miliating. The  practical  extent  of 
Bernard  Shaw's  anarchism  coincides 
with  the  anarchism  of  our  judges  and 
our  bishops. 

Those  who  dig  deeper  than  this,  with 
the  preconceived  resolution  to  find  that 
Bernard  Shaw  is  an  anarchist,  will  only 
be  more  hopelessly  misled.  They  will 
find  that  he  preaches,  as  we  have  al- 
ready discovered,  the  ultimate  suprem- 
acy of  passion  and  will;  that  he  sees 
the  gods  and  the  laws  of  each  genera- 
tion as  mere  expressions  of  the  will  and 
passion  of  their  generation;  and  that 
he  claims  for  posterity  the  right  to  su- 
persede them  as  soon  as  posterity  is 
moved  by  a  higher  will  and  a  finer  pas- 
sion. But  this  is  not  anarchism.  It  is 
40 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

so  far  from  being  anarchism  that  side 
by  side  with  these  doctrines  Bernard 
Shaw  has,  in  "The  Sanity  of  Art," 
written  down  one  of  the  best  defenses 
of  law  and  order — of  the  convenience 
and  necessity  of  policemen,  churches, 
and  all  kinds  of  public  authority — that 
has  appeared  in  popular  form  within  re- 
cent years.  It  is  true  that  Bernard 
Shaw  pleads  for  liberty,  and  points  out 
that  it  is  better  for  a  man  to  act  and 
think  responsibly  for  himself  than  to 
run  to  the  nearest  constable  or  parish 
priest.  But  it  is  also  true  that  he  wants 
people  to  have  no  more  liberty  than  is 
good  for  them,  and  that  he  very  seri- 
ously distrusts  the  ability  of  the  aver- 
age man  to  think  for  himself.  Bernard 
Shaw  knows  that  the  average  man  has 
neither  the  time  nor  the  brains  nor  the 
imagination  to  be  original  in  such  mat- 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

ters  as  crossing  the  road  or  getting  mar- 
ried or  determining  whether  he  ought 
or  ought  not  to  cut  the  throat  of  his 
neighbor. 

Nothing  could  be  further  from  the 
mind  of  Bernard  Shaw  than  the  philo- 
sophic anarchy  of  Godwin  or  John 
Stuart  Mill.  Bernard  Shaw  is  not  an 
anarchist  either  in  speculation  or  in 
practice.  He  is  as  sound  on  the  ques- 
tion of  law  and  order  as  Mr.  Asquith. 
He  is  as  correct  in  deportment  and  as 
regular  in  his  conduct  as  the  Vice- Chan- 
cellor of  Oxford.  The  most  pictorial 
way  of  emphasizing  the  difference  be- 
tween a  real  anarchist  and  Bernard 
Shaw  is  to  compare  the  handwriting  of 
Bernard  Shaw  and,  say,  of  Cunning- 
hame  Graham.  Bernard  Shaw  writes 
like  a  sensible  citizen  who  intends  his 
pages  to  be  read.  It  is  true  that  he  as- 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

serts  his  individuality  as  one  who  values 
what  is  comely  by  writing  the  most 
beautiful  hand  of  any  author  living, 
just  as  he  insists  that  his  books  shall  be 
printed  in  a  style  that  proclaims  him 
a  pupil  of  William  Morris.  But  he 
writes  mainly  to  be  read,  aware  that  the 
liberty  of  writing  illegibly  is  not  worth 
the  trouble  it  would  give  to  a  commu- 
nity which  practised  it.  The  writing 
of  Cunninghame  Graham,  on  the  other 
hand,  requires  an  expert  in  caligraphy. 
It  has  baffled  half  the  big  printing- 
houses  in  London.  It  is  the  last,  in- 
solent assertion  that  every  man  has  the 
right  to  do  as  he  pleases  regardless  of 
the  discomfort  and  loss  of  time  he 
thereby  inflicts  upon  his  neighbors.  It 
is,  in  one  word,  anarchic,  a  graphic  illus- 
tration of  the  great  gulf  that  is  fixed 
between  two  public  figures  of  the  time 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

who,  nevertheless,  have  impartially 
been  described  by  the  careless  as  an- 
archists. 


SHAW  A  PRECISION  RATHER 

THAN  A  CARELESS  MAN 

OF  LETTERS 

THE  eighth  fallacy  is  that  Ber- 
nard Shaw  is  a  headlong,  dash- 
ing, and  opiniative  writer,  without  tech- 
nical equipment,  who  succeeds  by  an 
impudent  trust  in  his  unassisted  genius, 
and  brings  off  his  best  efforts  by  a 
happy  fluke.  This  fallacy  has  stuck  to 
Bernard  Shaw  all  through  his  career 
as  a  critic  of  music,  painting,  the  drama, 
as  a  playwright,  as  a  pamphleteer,  as 
a  public  speaker.  When  G.  B.  S.,  as 
Corno  di  Bassett,  was  writing  about 
music  for  a  London  newspaper,  the 
45 


public  insisted  that  his  appointment  was 
a  joke.  It  was  the  public's  own  joke, 
and  the  public  enjoyed  it  immensely. 
Indeed,  it  chuckled  so  heartily  that  G. 
B.  S.  had  not  the  malice  to  undeceive 
it.  He  played  with  this  popular  legend 
of  himself,  as  he  has  so  often  played 
with  a  hundred  others.  He  was 
thought  to  be  merely  a  rude  young  man 
who  knocked  the  professors'  heads  to- 
gether without  the  least  idea  of  what 
they  contained.  Bernard  Shaw's  char- 
acteristic confutation  of  this  public  er- 
ror was  to  reduce  it  to  absurdity.  When 
people  handed  him  a  score,  he  held  it 
carefully  upside  down  and  studied  it 
in  that  position.  When  he  was  asked 
to  play  the  piano,  he  walked  to  the 
wrong  end.  Bernard  Shaw's  conduct 
as  a  critic  of  music,  acting  under  provo- 
cation, was  very  natural;  but  it  was  in 
46 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

the  result  unfortunate.  Popularly 
imagined  to  be  an  irresponsible  ama- 
teur with  a  literary  knack,  Bernard 
Shaw,  in  all  he  has  undertaken,  has,  if 
anything,  erred  from  an  excessive 
knowledge  and  interest  in  the  expert 
professional  and  technical  side  of  his 
subject.  Bernard  Shaw  knew  years 
ago  all  about  the  enormity  of  explod- 
ing undiminished  chords  of  the  ninth 
and  thirteenth  on  the  unsuspecting  ear, 
just  as  to-day  he  thoroughly  under- 
stands the  appallingly  scientific  pro- 
gressions of  Scriabin.  Similarly  he  can 
tell  you  the  difference  at  a  glance  be- 
tween real  sunshine  in  an  open  field  and 
the  good  north  light  of  a  Chelsea  stu- 
dio, or  explain  why  "values"  are  more 
difficult  to  capture  when  colors  are 
bright  than  when  they  are  looked  for 
in  a  dark  interior.  As  to  the  technic 
47 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

of  the  theater — well,  the  subject  is 
hardly  worth  discussing.  Some  of  his 
later  plays  are  nothing  if  they  are  not 
technical. 

The  fallacy  that  Bernard  Shaw  is  a 
happy  savage  among  critics  and  artists, 
ignorant  and  careless  of  form,  unread  in 
the  necessary  conventions,  speaking  al- 
ways at  random  with  the  confidence  that 
only  a  perfect  ignorance  can  give,  is 
particularly  deplorable,  because  it  nec- 
essarily blinds  its  adherents  to  Bernard 
Shaw's  most  serious  defect  both  as 
critic  and  creator.  Usually  Bernard 
Shaw  knows  too  much,  rather  than  too 
little,  of  his  subject.  He  is  too  keenly 
interested  in  its  bones  and  its  mechan- 
ism. His  famous  distinction  between 
music  which  is  decorative  and  music 
which  is  dramatic  is  quite  unsound,  as 
I  would  undertake  to  show  in  nothing 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

less  than  a  small  pamphlet ;  but  it  is  not 
the  mistake  of  a  critic  ignorant  of  mu- 
sic. It  is  rather  the  mistake  of  a  critic 
too  keenly  absorbed  in  the  technic  of 
music. 

If  the  professors  in  the  early  nineties 
had  objected  to  G.  B.  S.  because  he 
was  liable  to  lapse  into  the  pedantry  of 
which  they  themselves  were  accused, 
they  would  have  been  nearer  the  mark 
than  they  were  in  foolishly  dismissing 
him  as  an  ignoramus.  Similarly,  as  a 
dramatic  critic,  G.  B.  S.  erred  not  by  at- 
taching too  little  value  to  the  forms  and 
conventions  of  the  theater,  but  by  at- 
taching too  much.  It  is  true  that  he 
did  not  make  the  absurd  mistake  of 
some  of  his  followers,  and  regard  Ibsen 
as  a  great  dramatist  on  account  of  one 
or  two  pettifogging  and  questionable 
reforms  in  dramatic  convention,  such 
49 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

as  the  abolishing  of  soliloquies  and 
asides  and  extra  doors  to  the  sitting- 
room.  But  he  certainly  attached  too 
much  importance  to  these  things,  mainly 
because  he  knew  so  much  about  them; 
and  this  critical  insistence  of  his  as  a 
Saturday  Reviewer  has  had  its  revenge 
in  some  of  his  own  plays,  where  his 
purely  technical  mastery  of  theatrical 
devices,  his  stage-cleverness,  and  crafts- 
man's virtuosity  have  led  him  into  me- 
chanical horse-play  and  stock  positions 
unworthy  of  the  author  of  "John  Bull's 
Other  Island"  and  "Major  Barbara." 
Bernard  Shaw  has  continually  suffered 
from  knowing  his  subject  too  well  from 
the  angle  of  the  expert,  and  he  has  fre- 
quently fallen  into  the  mistakes  of  the 
expert.  Far  from  being  the  happy  and 
careless  privateer  of  popular  belief,  he 
is  usually  to  be  found  struggling  for 
50 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

freedom  under  the  oppression  of  things 
stored  for  reference  in  his  capacious 
memory.  The  great  critic,  like  any  or- 
dinary, unskilled  spectator,  should  be 
able  to  look  at  a  work  of  art  without 
prejudice  in  favor  of  any  particular 
form  or  fashion.  It  should  not  matter 
to  him  a  jot  or  influence  his  judgment 
in  the  slightest  whether  the  music  he 
hears  is  symphonic  or  metrical,  whether 
the  thirteenth  is  exploded  as  a  thir- 
teenth or  prepared  as  a  six-four  chord. 
He  should  be  similarly  indifferent 
whether  a  dramatist  talks  to  him  in 
blank-verse  soliloquy  or  in  conversa- 
tional duologue.  Preoccupation  with 
manner,  apart  from  matter — usually 
implying  an  a  priori  prejudice  in  favor 
of  one  manner  over  another — is  the 
mark  of  pedantry;  and  of  this  pedantry 
— always  the  pedantry  of  a  man  who 
51 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

is  expert  and  knows  too  much — Ber- 
nard Shaw  is  not  always  free,  though 
he  is  far  too  good  a  critic  to  be  often  at 
fault. 


VIII 

THE  REAL  SHAW) 

WE  have  not  yet  exhausted  the 
popular  fallacies  about  Ber- 
nard Shaw,  but  as  most  of  my  readers 
will  already  be  wondering  what  is  left 
of  the  man  who  has  just  described  Sir 
Edward  Grey  as  a  Junker,  I  will  turn 
now  from  George  Bernard  Shaw,  who 
is  as  legendary  as  the  Flying  Dutch- 
man, to  the  very  positive  and  substan- 
tial author  of  "Commonsense  and  the 
War."  I  have  yet  to  explain  why  Ber- 
nard Shaw,  stripped  of  his  professional 
masks,  and  rescued  from  the  miscon- 
ceptions of  his  admirers,  remains  one 
of  the  most  striking  public  figures  of 
our  day,  and  must  fairly  be  regarded 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

as  the  most  important  apparition  in  the 
British  theater  since  Goldsmith  and 
Sheridan.  We  have  seen  that  Bernard 
Shaw  is  not  original  in  what  he 
preaches,  is  erudite  rather  than  adven- 
turous, is  in  no  sense  revolutionary  or 
anarchical,  is  extremely  serious,  and  is 
far  from  being  an  orgiastic  and  impu- 
dent rationalist  for  whom  drifting  hu- 
manity is  stuff  for  a  paradox.  Ber- 
nard Shaw  has  not  won  the  notice  of 
mankind  because  he  has  thought  of 
things  which  have  hitherto  occurred  to 
no  one  else;  nor  has  he  won  the  notice 
of  mankind  because  he  has  a  native  gift 
of  buffoonery  and  a  talent  for  the  stage. 
The  merit  of  Bernard  Shaw  has  to  be 
sought  outside  his  doctrine.  The  se- 
cret of  his  genius  lies  deeper  than  his 
fun,  and  has  scarcely  anything  to  do 
with  his  craft. 

54 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

It  ironically  happens  that  Bernard 
Shaw  as  a  critic  has  virtually  made  it 
impossible  for  those  who  accept  his  crit- 
icism to  allow  that  Bernard  Shaw  as  a 
dramatic  author  has  any  right  to  be 
really  famous.  We  have  seen  that  Ber- 
nard Shaw  as  a  critic  repeatedly  fell 
into  the  grievous  error  of  separating  the 
stuff  he  was  criticizing  into  manner  and 
matter.  Thus,  confronted  with  the 
Elizabethan  dramatists,  Bernard  Shaw 
always  maintained  that  they  had  noth- 
ing to  say  and  that  they  were  only  toler- 
able because  they  had  an  incomparably 
wonderful  way  of  saying  it.  Compar- 
ing Shakspere  with  Ibsen,  for  example, 
he  would  point  out  that,  if  you  para- 
phrased Ibsen's  "Peter  Gynt,"  it  still 
remained  good  intellectual  stuff,  and 
that,  if  you  paraphrased  Shakspere's 
"Life 's  but  a  walking  shadow,"  it  be- 
55 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

came  the  merest  commonplace.  Ber- 
nard Shaw  thence  proceeded  to  draw 
the  moral  that  Ibsen,  apart  from  mere 
favor  and  prettiness,  was  the  greater 
and  more  penetrating  dramatist.  For- 
tunately for  Bernard  Shaw,  as  we  shall 
shortly  realize,  this  criticism  of  his  is 
not  only  false  in  fact,  but  it  is  also  non- 
sense in  theory.  It  is  false  in  fact,  be- 
cause it  is  quite  untrue  that  Shakspere 
paraphrased  is  commonplace  whereas 
Ibsen  paraphrased  is  an  intellectual 
feast.  It  would  be  more  to  the  point 
if  Bernard  Shaw  had  said  that  Shak- 
spere paraphrased  is  commonplace  for 
all  time  and  that  Ibsen  paraphrased  is 
commonplace  for  only  the  nineteenth 
century.  It  would  be  still  more  to  the 
point  if  Bernard  Shaw  had  said  that 
it  is  quite  impossible  to  paraphrase  any 
work  of  genius  in  so  far  as  genius  has 
56 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

gone  to  its  making.  It  is  absurd  to 
talk  of  paraphrasing  Shakspere,  be- 
cause Shakspere  is  of  genius  all  com- 
pact; and  it  is  as  true  of  Ibsen  as  of 
Shakspere  that,  so  far  as  he  is  a  genius 
and  not  merely  a  scientific  naturalist, 
it  is  absurd  to  separate  what  he  says 
from  his  way  of  saying  it.  When 
Shakspere  has  written: 

.  .  .  Out,  out,  brief  candle ! 

Life  's  but  a  walking  shadow,  a  poor  player 

That   struts  and   frets   his   hour  upon  the 

stage 

And  then  is  heard  no  more:  it  is  a  tale 
Told  by  an  idiot,  full  of  sound  and  fury, 
Signifying  nothing. 

he  has  written  more  than  the  equiva- 
lent of  "life  is  not  worth  living."  If 
Bernard  Shaw  will  not  admit  that  Shak- 
spere in  this  passage  is  no  more  than 
an  utterer  of  a  universal  platitude  for 
57 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

pessimists,  he  will  have  to  agree  that 
Ibsen  is  no  more  than  an  utterer  of 
parochial  platitude  for  the  suffragette 
platform.  Probably,  however,  now 
that  Bernard  Shaw  has  himself  become 
a  classical  author,  he  has  realized  that 
to  distinguish  between  the  ideas  of  a 
literary  genius  and  the  language  in 
which  they  are  expressed  is  as  absurd 
as  to  distinguish  between  the  subject 
of  a  painter  and  the  way  in  which  it  is 
(painted,  or  between  the  themes  of  a 
musician  and  the  notes  in  which  they 
are  rendered. 

At  any  rate,  Bernard  Shaw  must  re- 
alize how  very  badly  he  himself  would 
fare  under  such  a  distinction.  We 
have  seen  that  Bernard  Shaw  in  doc- 
trine and  idea  is  in  no  sense  original. 
His  celebration  of  the  state  is  as  old 
as  Plato.  His  particular  sort  of  puri- 
58 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

tanism  is  as  old  as  Cromwell.  His  par- 
ticular brand  of  socialism  is  as  old  as 
Owen.  A  paraphrase  of  Bernard 
Shaw — a  reduction  of  Bernard  Shaw 
to  the  bare  bones  of  his  subject  matter 
— would  be  as  intolerable  as  the 
speeches  of  his  disciples  and  some  of 
his  masters  usually  are.  In  a  word,  if 
Bernard  Shaw  is  a  genius,  he  is  a  genius 
for  the  same  reason  that  Shakspere  is 
a  genius.  He  is  a  genius  not  because 
he  has  anything  new  to  say,  but  because 
he  has  a  passionate  and  a  personal  way 
of  saying  it.  If  I  had  the  time  to  go 
deeper  into  this  matter,  I  should  like  to 
ask  whether  it  is  really  possible  to  get 
hold  of  a  new  idea  as  distinguished  from 
a  new  way  of  presenting  an  old  one. 
But,  at  all  events,  I  have  already  said 
enough  to  justify  the  assumption  that, 
if  Bernard  Shaw  can  claim  an  immor- 
59 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

tality,  however  brief,  it  will  not  be  by 
virtue  of  his  original,  novel,  and  start- 
ling opinions,  but  by  virtue  of  his  liter- 
ary presentation  of  them  in  a  manner 
entirely  his  own.  The  equations  read: 

The  ideas  of  Bernard  Shaw  =  the 
commonplaces  of  his  time. 

The  ideas  of  Bernard  Shaw  -j-  his 
way  of  presenting  them  =  G.  B.  S. 


60 


IX 

PASSION  AND  STYLE  THE  SECRETS 
OF  SHAW'S  SUCCESS 

BERNARD  SHAW,  then,  has 
won  the  attention  of  the  present 
generation,  and  he  will  hold  the  atten- 
tion of  posterity  not  because  he  has  new 
theories  about  the  world,  but  because, 
by  virtue  of  strictly  personal  and  in- 
alienable qualities,  he  is  able  to  give  to 
the  most  "hackneyed  clap-trap"  (Ber- 
nard Shaw's  own  description)  an  air 
of  novelty.  Were  he  baldly  to  tell  us 
that  incomes  should  be  equally  divided, 
and  that  interest  is  an  iniquitous  and 
profoundly  unsocial  device  invented  by 
those  who  have  too  much  money  for  the 
61 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

purpose  of  levying  blackmail  upon 
those  who  have  not  enough,  we  should 
simply  remember  that  we  had  read  all 
this  years  ago  in  an  old  book  and  turn 
to  something  rather  more  worth  our 
time  and  attention. 

But  when  Bernard  Shaw  writes 
"Widower's  Houses"  or  "Socialism 
and  Superior  Brains,"  it  is  quite  an- 
other matter.  Here  we  have  original 
work  of  the  first  quality.  The  ideas 
are  common  to  us  all;  but  Bernard 
Shaw's  presentation  of  these  ideas 
thrills  us  with  a  conviction  that  nothing 
quite  like  it  has  ever  come  within  our 
experience.  We  realize  that  we  have 
never  before  encountered  just  this  blend 
of  wit  and  sense,  this  intellectual  wrestle 
and  thrust,  this  fervor  and  fun,  this  ar- 
gumentative and  syllabic  virtuosity, 
this  apparently  impudent  disregard  of 
62 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

style  that  only  the  more  piquantly  em- 
phasizes a  perfectly  individual  and 
highly  cultivated  literary  art.  Then 
we  begin  to  wonder  what  is  the  inspira- 
tion of  this  rapid  Jehu ;  whence  does  he 
get  his  impulse  to  drive  all  these  ancient 
ideas  so  furiously  through  the  modern 
world.  How  are  we  to  explain  the  pas- 
sion that  fills  him  and  lifts  his  work  to 
levels  higher  than  the  platform  he  un- 
dertakes to  fill?  We  are  sensible  in 
Bernard  Shaw's  best  work  of  a  horse- 
power, of  a  spiritual  energy,  which  is 
no  more  the  product  of  his  doctrinal 
prejudice  against  rent  and  interest  than 
the  energy  which  drove  Wagner  to  com- 
pose the  Nibelung's  Ring  was  the  prod- 
uct of  his  desire  to  justify  his  revolu- 
tionary principles  or  to  improve  the 
operatic  stage  scenery  of  his  genera- 
tion. We  know  that  the  inspiration  of 
63 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

Bernard  Shaw  must  be  something 
deeper  than  a  dislike  of  Roebuck  Rams- 
den  or  a  desire  to  abolish  Mr.  Sartorius. 
We  know,  in  fact,  that  Bernard  Shaw, 
like  every  man  of  genius,  is  the  happy 
agent  of  a  power  and  a  passion  which 
uses  his  prejudices,  memories,  and  doc- 
trines in  a  way  he  is  intellectually  pow- 
erless to  resist. 

The  real  thrill  of  his  work  is  con- 
veyed in  some  sentences  of  his  preface 
to  "Man  and  Superman" — sentences 
used  by  him  in  quite  another  connec- 
tion: 

This  is  the  true  joy  of  life:  the  being  used 
for  a  purpose  recognised  by  yourself  as  a 
mighty  one;  the  being  thoroughly  worn  out 
before  you  are  thrown  on  the  scrap-heap ; 
the  being  a  force  of  nature,  instead  of  a 
feverish,  selfish  little  clod  of  ailments  and 
grievances,  complaining  that  the  world  will 
not  devote  itself  to  making  you  happy. 
64 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

To  apply  this  passage  to  the  work  of 
Bernard  Shaw  is  again  to  destroy  the 
popular  conception  of  him  as  merely 
the  acute  raisowieur,  the  intellectual 
critic  of  his  kind,  with  a  wallet  of  revo- 
lutionary propaganda  whereby  his  rep- 
utation lives  or  dies.  Not  his  doctrine 
and  not  his  deliberate  pulpiteering 
make  Bernard  Shaw  a  vital  influence 
in  modern  literature.  The  real  secret 
of  his  influence  can  be  explained  in  a 
sentence.  Bernard  Shaw  has  passion 
and  he  has  style.  Therefore,  like  every 
man  of  genius,  he  is  driven  to  say  more 
than  he  intends,  and  to  say  it  in  an  ar- 
resting voice. 

It  remains  to  ask  what  is  the  prime 
irritant  of  this  passion  in  Bernard  Shaw. 
Where  are  we  to  look  for  the  catfish 
which  keeps  his  mental  aquarium  alive 
and  astir?  First,  without  preliminary, 
65 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

let  us  dart  on  that  preface  "Why  for 
Puritans.,"  which  more  than  any  other 
gives  us  the  key  to  Bernard  Shaw's 
work  and  character.  Bernard  Shaw 
writes  as  follows: 

I  have,  I  think,  always  been  a  Puritan  in 
my  attitude  towards  Art.  I  am  as  fond  of 
fine  music  and  handsome  buildings  as  Mil- 
ton was,  or  Cromwell,  or  Bunyan;  but  if  I 
found  that  they  were  becoming  the  instru- 
ments of  a  systematic  idolatry  of  sensuous- 
ness,  I  would  hold  it  good  statesmanship  to 
blow  every  cathedral  in  the  world  to  pieces 
with  dynamite,  organ  and  all,  without  the 
least  heed  to  the  screams  of  the  art  critics 
and  cultured  voluptuaries. 

Bernard  Shaw's  primal  inspiration, 
that  is  to  say,  is  not  esthetic  or  intellec- 
tual, but  moral.  We  have  to  reckon 
with  a  moral  fury  where  he  most  indi- 
vidually rages.  The  demon  which 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

seizes  his  pen  at  the  critical  moment, 
and  uses  him  for  its  own  enthusiastic 
purpose,  is  the  demon  which  drove  Mil- 
ton to  destroy  Arminius.  When  Ber- 
nard Shaw  imagines  that  he  coolly  and 
reasonably  desires,  simply  as  a  practical 
socialist  and  in  the  name  of  common 
sense,  to  nationalize  land  and  capital, 
and  give  to  everybody  as  much  money 
as  he  requires,  he  is  mistaken.  Like 
every  other  prophet  who  has  succeeded 
in  moving  his  generation,  Bernard 
Shaw  begins  with  a  passion  and  a  prej- 
udice, and  afterward  manufactures  and 
systematizes  the  evidence.  That  Ber- 
nard Shaw  is  a  socialist  is  an  accident 
of  the  time.  The  essential  thing  is  that 
Bernard  Shaw  passionately  hates  all 
that  is  complacent,  malevolent,  callous, 
inequitable,  oppressive,  unsocial,  stu- 
pid, irreligious,  enervating,  narrow, 
67 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

misinformed,  unimaginative,  lazy,  en- 
vious, unclean,  disloyal,  mercenary, 
and  extravagant.  Hating  all  this  with 
the  positive,  energetic,  and  proselytiz- 
ing hatred  of  an  incorrigible  moralist, 
he  has  naturally  seized  on  the  biggest 
and  most  adequate  stick  in  reach  with 
which  to  beat  the  nineteenth-century 
sinner.  This  stick  happened  to  be  the 
socialist  stick.  If  G.  B.  S.  had  lived 
with  Grosseteste  in  the  thirteenth  cen- 
tury, it  would  have  been  the  no-taxa- 
tion-without-representation  stick.  If 
he  had  lived  with  Star  Chamber  in  the 
sixteenth  century,  it  would  have  been 
the  Habeas  Corpus  stick.  If  he  had 
lived  with  Rousseau  in  the  eighteenth 
century,  it  would  have  been  the  social- 
contract-and-law-of-nature  stick.  Ber- 
nard Shaw's  socialism  stick  is  simply 
his  weapon — the  most  convenient 
68 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

weapon  to  hand — with  which  to  convict 
a  society  founded  upon  capitalism  of 
the  greatest  possible  amount  of  sin 
with  the  least  possible  opportunity  of 
an  overwhelming  retort  from  the  sinner. 
The  important  thing  is  not  that  Ber- 
nard Shaw  preaches  socialism,  but  that 
he  uses  the  doctrines  of  socialism  as 
Cromwell's  troopers  used  the  psalms  of 
David  or  as  Tolstoy  used  the  gospels 
of  Christ — namely,  to  put  the  unjust 
man  and  his  evil  ways  out  of  court  and 
countenance.  To  this  end  he  employs 
also  his  craft  as  a  dialectician,  his  gift 
as  a  stylist,  his  clear  exposition  and  wit, 
his  fun,  irony,  observation  of  men,  gen- 
ius for  mystification  and  effective  pose 
— all,  indeed,  that  enters  into  the  public 
idea  of  G.  B.  S.  These  things  are 
merely  auxiliary ;  any  moment  they  are 
likely  to  be  caught  up  in  the  service  of 
69 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

his  passionate  mission — a  mission  of 
which  Bernard  Shaw  is  often  himself 
aware  when  he  is  most  firmly  under  its 
dominion. 


70 


OUR  MODERN  TREATMENT   OF 
PROPHETS 

THIS  brings  us  within  view  of  Ber- 
nard Shaw's  pamphlet  on  the 
war.  It  is  natural  in  a  preacher  that 
the  most  unpardonable  sin  of  the  many 
he  is  called  to  denounce  should  be  the 
sin  of  complacency;  for  the  sin  of  com- 
placency virtually  amounts  to  the  sin 
of  refusing  to  hear  what  the  preacher 
has  to  say,  or,  at  all  events,  of  refusing 
to  take  it  seriously.  Bernard  Shaw  has 
said  continuously  for  many  years  that 
the  average  man  is  an  unsocial  sinner; 
and  the  average  man,  instead  of  hang- 
ing his  head  and  mending  his  ways,  has 
smiled  in  the  face  of  the  prophet.  At 
71 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

one  time  the  prophet  was  stoned,  and  at 
another  time  he  was  poisoned  or  ostra- 
cized or  pelted  in  the  pillory.  But  we 
have  lately  learned  a  more  effective  way 
of  dealing  with  a  prophet:  either  we 
turn  him  into  a  society  preacher  and 
enjoy  his  denunciation  of  what  our 
neighbors  do,  or  we  pay  him  hand- 
somely to  amuse  us  in  the  theater.  We 
have  thus  improved  immensely  on  the 
methods  of  the  scribe  and  the  Pharisee ; 
for  where  the  scribe  and  the  Pharisee 
destroyed  only  the  bodies  of  their 
prophets,  we,  with  an  even  more  thor- 
ough complacency,  aim  also  at  destroy- 
ing their  souls — usually  with  some  suc- 
cess. 

But  the  British  public  has  not  suc- 
ceeded with  Bernard  Shaw,  who  con- 
tinues   to    be    periodically    stirred    to 
frenzy  by  his  inability  to  make  every 
72      . 


HAKLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

one  realize  that  he  or  she  is  directly  re- 
sponsible for  all  the  crimes  and  miseries 
of  modern  civilization.  Moreover,  be- 
cause Bernard  Shaw  has  lived  most  of 
his  life  in  England,  and  has  therefore 
been  less  seriously  taken  in  England 
than  elsewhere,  he  has  concluded  that  the 
English  are  more  complacent  than  any 
other  people  in  the  world.  More  and 
more  he  has  come  to  regard  it  as  his 
special  mission  to  humble  this  com- 
placency, to  convict  the  Englishman, 
above  all  men,  of  sin,  and  of  the  neces- 
sity for  humility  and  repentance. 
Therefore,  whenever  the  British  public 
becomes,  in  the  view  of  Bernard  Shaw, 
unduly  exalted, — whenever,  in  fact,  it 
thinks  it  has  a  reason  to  be  proud  of  the 
British  name, — Bernard  Shaw  is  at 
once  suspicious  and  usually  incensed. 
Latterly  he  has  been  unable  to  resist 
73 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

any  occasion  of  pricking  the  inflation, 
real  or  imagined,  of  the  British  spirit; 
and  latterly,  misled  by  habit,  and  ex- 
aggerating the  sins  he  was  born  to 
chastise,  Bernard  Shaw  has  made  some 
serious  mistakes. 

Thus  when,  more  than  two  years  ago, 
the  whole  British  nation  was  struck 
with  grief  at  the  loss  of  the  Titanic,  and 
was  reading  with  a  reasonable  pride  of 
the  splendid  behavior  of  her  heroic  crew, 
Bernard  Shaw  rose  in  his  robe  of  the 
prophet  and  told  the  public  not  to  ex- 
aggerate its  vicarious  gallantry.  Then 
in  August,  1914,  when  Great  Britain 
was  straining  every  nerve  to  get  her 
army  to  the  Continent  in  time  to  save 
Belgium  from  the  worst  of  war,  Ber- 
nard Shaw  published  an  article  in  the 
British  press  virtually  to  the  effect  that 
Great  Britain  was  not  fighting  for  the 
74 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

sanctity  of  treaties  or  the  rights  of  a 
little  nation,  but  for  British  homes  and 
British  skins.  Maliciously  he  chose  for 
the  publication  of  this  assault  upon 
British  complacency  the  most  obsti- 
nately and  hatefully  complacent  British 
newspaper  at  his  disposal. 

Finally  there  came  the  celebrated 
pamphlet  "Commonsense  and  the 
War."  This  must  be  read  as  Bernard 
Shaw's  most  audacious  effort  to  punc- 
ture the  self-esteem  of  the  British  pub- 
lic. It  has  caused  much  brain-search- 
ing among  those  who  have  simply  re- 
garded George  Bernard  Shaw  as  a  very 
discreet  and  financially  successful 
mountebank;  for  Bernard  Shaw,  in 
writing  this  pamphlet,  has  done  a 
clearly  unpopular  thing.  Undoubtedly 
he  has  angered  and  estranged  many  of 
his  admirers.  Some  regard  the  pam- 
75 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

phlet  as  an  obscure  attempt  to  discredit 
the  allied  cause.  Others  regard  it  as 
an  escapade  of  revolting  levity,  inex- 
pedient from  a  patriotic  point  of  view 
and  essentially  wrong  in  its  conclusions. 
The  real  point  that  concerns  us  here  is 
that  the  pamphlet  is  not  a  new,  unex- 
pected, or  isolated  performance  of  Ber- 
nard Shaw,  but  a  natural  sequel  of  all 
he  has  hitherto  written.  Those  who 
have  followed  Bernard  Shaw  to  the 
threshold  of  his  pamphlet  on  the  war 
have  no  right  at  this  time  to  be  aston- 
ished or  to  refuse  him  their  applause. 
"Commonsense  and  the  War"  is  simply 
a  topical  and  a  later  edition  of  "Widow- 
er's Houses."  That  is  to  say,  it  is  a 
tract  in  which  the  case  against  British 
complacency  is  put  at  a  maximum  by  a 
fearless  and  passionate  advocate  for  the 
prosecution. 

76 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

Not  Bernard  Shaw,  but  the  time,  has 
changed.  Here  we  strike  at  the  root  of 
Bernard  Shaw's  mistake.  Hitherto, 
he  was  doing  salutary  work  in  his  cam- 
paign against  the  silent  self-assurance 
of  the  mean,  sensual  man.  There  are 
as  many  complacent  persons  in  Great 
Britain  as  elsewhere,  and  so  long  as 
Great  Britain  was  at  peace  with  her 
neighbors,  it  was  beneficial  that  Ber- 
nard Shaw  should  imagine  that  the 
British,  among  whom  he  lived,  were 
more  guilty  in  this  respect  than  any 
other  extant  community,  and  that  he 
should  lose  no  opportunity  for  satirical, 
ironical,  comic,  or  didactic  reproof. 
But  when  Great  Britain  and  her  allies 
had  their  back  to  the  wall,  when  there 
were  opponents  to  be  countered  and  met, 
Bernard  Shaw's  insular  mistake  that 
the  British  as  a  nation  are  any  more 
77 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

complacent  than  any  other  nation  with 
a  past  to  be  proud  of  and  a  future  to 
believe  in  became  a  really  injurious 
heresy.  It  began,  indeed,  to  look 
rather  like  giving  away  his  people  to 
the  enemy.  Of  course  it  was  nothing 
of  the  kind.  "Commonsense  and  the 
War,"  intelligently  read,  vibrates  with 
patriotism,  and  it  proudly  proclaims  the 
essential  Tightness  of  the  struggle  in 
which  Great  Britain  is  now  engaged. 
But  the  patriotism  of  "Commonsense 
and  the  War"  is  less  apparent  to  the 
audiences  which  laugh  at  Bernard  Shaw 
in  the  theater  and  outrageously  regard 
him  as  a  privileged  fool  at  the  court  of 
King  Demos,  than  the  fact  that  it  be- 
gins by  asserting  that  Sir  Edward  Grey 
is  a  Junker,  and  goes  on  to  examine 
very  particularly  whether  we  really 
have  the  right  to  condemn  our  enemies 
78 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

without  a  preliminary  inquiry  into  our 
own  consciences  and  affairs. 

Bernard  Shaw  has  made  a  mistake, 
but  it  is  a  natural,  not  an  ignoble,  mis- 
take. It  will  have  no  permanent  effect 
upon  those  who  are  sensible,  even  in 
Bernard  Shaw's  most  special  pleading, 
of  the  passionate  moral  sincerity  which 
gives  consistency  and  fire  to  all  he 
writes.  "Commonsense  and  the  War" 
was  a  blunder;  but  it  was  also  an  act  of 
disinterested  courage.  It  was  not  dic- 
tated by  any  wish  to  stand  in  front  of 
the  picture  or  to  splash  in  a  sea  too  deep 
for  purposes  of  exhibition.  Bernard 
Shaw,  in  writing  "Commonsense  and  the 
War,"  is  simply  the  priest  who  insists 
upon  sacrifice  before  going  into  battle, 
or  believe  that  every  good  fight  should 
be  preceded  by  confession,  absolution, 
and  high  mass. 

79 


GEORGE  BERNARD  SHAW 

One  word  more.  Bernard  Shaw,  the 
prophet  and  the  puritan,  lives  in  his 
work.  But  the  passion  which  gives  him 
uniformity  and  purpose  as  a  public  fig- 
ure has  not  impaired  his  personal  humor, 
his  tolerance  for  all  that  is  sweet  and 
commendable,  his  broadness  of  view  and 
eagerly  inquisitive  outlook  upon  life,  his 
candor  and  honesty  of  mind,  his  gener- 
ous welcome  of  new  ideas,  his  love  of 
beautiful  things,  his  ability  to  appreciate 
and  sympathize  even  with  those  forces 
which  are  banded  to  destroy  him.  These 
are  the  qualities  which  have  obscured 
from  contemporaries  the  essential  sim- 
plicity of  his  mind,  and  have  warmly 
endeared  him  to  the  younger  generation 
of  authors  and  critics  who  have  learned 
from  their  master  how  profitably  they 
may  supersede  him.  This  younger 
generation,  though  it  very  frequently 
80 


HARLEQUIN  OR  PATRIOT? 

turns  the  weapons  of  Bernard  Shaw 
against  himself,  will  never  forget  or 
neglect  the  debt  it  owes  to  the  helpful, 
patient,  and  wise  counselor  it  has  been 
privileged  to  observe  and  know; 


FINIS 


81 


11S719 


IlilHllltt"''  A   Ad  ft 


